by Peter Barry
For a moment, I contemplated leaving him where he was and running up- or downstairs, to a different room to see if I could spot the enemy sniper, but my heart wasn’t in it. If someone was now targeting me, as Santo had always warned me would happen if I became too successful at sniping, then perhaps it was better if he thought he’d killed me. So I sat outside in the corridor and had a cigarette. Later I patched up Mr Gilhooley, who was still moaning and carrying on in a desperate bid for sympathy. His brains, full of blackboard ephemera, useless history dates, the names of boys and girls and teaching rosters, I stuffed carelessly back into his cotton skull. ‘You should live,’ I said. ‘Don’t go on about it.’
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It happened when I was in prison. Definitely, that’s where I had my epiphany – if that’s not too grandiose a word. I remember staring at the grey walls and bars that enclosed me, the bars discoloured halfway up their length by the thousands of hands that had gripped them over the years. That’s when it first struck me that I should go to Sarajevo. It was suddenly so obvious and clear: I would escape.
As I lay on the hard, stained mattress trying to block from my consciousness the snores of the two men sharing the cell with me, I looked up at the dim night light outside in the corridor and remembered what my father had told me at Christmas about the city amongst the mountains where he’d been born. I knew I’d be welcomed with open arms, just as he promised. They needed me as much as I needed them. I was so excited by these nocturnal musings, I was sorely tempted to wake up the more educated of my two cellmates and inform him of my decision. But wisdom prevailed.
In the early hours, it dawned on me that I should go to Sarajevo for the experience. That was my sacred duty as an author: to experience life, to record those experiences, to follow my instincts, to surrender to every impulse. So that’s what I’d do. I’d become a sniper. It didn’t sound too dangerous. The citizens of Belgrade were rumoured to go to Sarajevo for a weekend of sniping – for fun. It had a certain frisson about it, but without too much risk. I could then collect material for a novel that wouldn’t be boring, plodding or expected. I’d write a book that Mulqueeny’s reader would be incapable of saying was predictable or he’d read before. It would be different – so different it would be unique. I’d find a story in Sarajevo that hadn’t been written before. In that nightmare city I’d fulfil my lifetime’s dream, discover an idea that even the slowest, stupidest publisher’s reader would be unable to resist.
There was no place for me in England, that was for certain: I’d reached a dead end there. The place was like a stagnant village pond overgrown with duckweed. The place was boring, grey and predictable. I needed change. Not only was it likely I’d feel more at home in the country of my father, but it was likely to be a more valuable experience than cleaning out the school toilets. Like Stephen Dedalus I would choose ‘silence, exile, and cunning.’
Looking back I think the ordinariness of life in London was reflected in my writing, and I had needed to distance myself from the mundane. The London I knew was cold and wet. Just before I left I had lived – no, existed – through those miserable January and February days when the realities of life quietly reassert themselves over the abstractions of Christmas and New Year; when the celebrations, joviality and bonhomie surrender once again to the weary, humdrum, crowded trudge to work. A continuous stream of cars and double-decker buses splashed through the wet streets of Kilburn, while crowds of people jostled and dodged each other on the pavements. The area concentrated hard, did everything in its power, to be rundown, dirty and brickish. In that suburb I felt perpetually bricked in; it was like living life in an unplastered room. Anything green – and there was very little that was green, apart from the baize inside the local snooker hall – had to fight for air, for space, just like the people who lived there. Restaurants, like overflowing rubbish bins, spilled along the pavements: Caribbean, Indian, Turkish, Thai, burger bars, as well as the halal meat shops. Discount-furniture stores battled with cut-price supermarkets, betting and charity shops carried on their uneven fight for people’s dole money, and outside one poky, begrimed shop, suitcases were lined up, padlocked together by a single chain, as if promising a possible escape to a brighter, greener, less brickish place. The incessant noise (as omnipresent as the smell of curry) numbed the brain, the honking, droning, rattling forever in my head.
Little wonder I was struggling to write something different, something that had never been seen before, that was truly original. It had been necessary to escape, I can see that clearly enough now. The only excitement in my last year, the only moment of originality in that dull metropolis, the only event that sticks out in my mind during those twelve months of nothingness was the time I returned to my flat in the early hours of the morning, when the traffic on Shoot Up Hill was only spasmodic, and found the Dawes’ cat, Sharon Stone, hanging from the wrought-iron corbel that supported the lintel above the main door, mouth open as if she was still keen to inhale a little oxygen. Slowly turning in the darkness, she resembled some highwayman of old, on a gibbet at a crossroads on the moors. Bridgette stood next to me on the front doorstep at three in the morning, screaming beneath the gently oscillating body, like some demented Janet Leigh in the shower – Janet Leigh discovers Sharon Stone. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, Milan, this is a bit more exciting than usual. This is a little different. This is nice and neighbourly.’
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The last two days have been busy: the enemy tried to break out of the city. As people say: ‘It’s easy to get into Sarajevo, impossible to leave.’ There was some heavy fighting, and for a time it was more exciting than usual. Just what the doctor ordered.
They started to bombard our positions to the east and west of the city soon after dark, but it was a pitiful display. I wouldn’t have noticed anything different if someone hadn’t told me what was happening. They have no heavy firepower down there, although there are rumours of American-made assault rifles and anti-tank weapons now getting through. After they’d fired at us for about an hour, convoys of trucks, the leading ones laden with soldiers and followed by others full of huddled civilians, made their bid for freedom. There was something frenetic about it all, a desperation accentuated by the crashing gear changes and labouring engines of the trucks. After our cannons found their range, there was also plenty of shouting and screaming. The scene was lit up by exploding shells and the flicker of flames. Across the sky, phosphorescent tracer bullets stitched haphazard paths. Some people tried to escape from the disabled trucks, and we picked them off as they ran for cover at the sides of the road. We caught a few of them, but in the poor light it was difficult to tell how many. Many trucks were abandoned, some bursting into flames. A few succeeded in turning around and heading back to where they’d come from, bolting back to the safety of their holes.
It struck me as a particularly futile exercise, and I couldn’t even see the sense in us retaliating – apart from the fun of doing something different and breaking the monotony. Why not simply let them flee the city? If a few people escaped, so ‘what? If everyone left, what did it matter? If they had succeeded in breaking out, where were they going to go? They didn’t have the manpower to surround us, that was for sure. So they’d have been faced with a long drive through territory that we hold, with little prospect of reaching their own people. We’d be able to pick them off one by one. It was, like most aspects of this war, quite pointless, but also momentarily entertaining.
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Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’ That was Gauguin, the accountant-cum-artist-cum-lover of natives fellow. And my spokesman.
Yes, I was upset. She upset me. It was that simple. So I planned to fuck her up. I dreamt of doing a Gauguin on her. It would be the perfect way to get at Mulqueeny, by getting at her. I wanted to laugh at her. Hand up to my mouth, mimicking her pretence of stifling the guffaws, I wanted to laugh at her humiliation. But how best to bring this about, that was th
e tricky bit.
The choice was between psychological and physical damage – with the latter striking me as possibly more satisfying. The problem with psychological damage – poisonous letters, anonymous phone calls, whispered innuendos and suchlike – was that the results were too hidden, too hard to quantify, whereas with physical damage there was the satisfaction of surveying broken legs, smashed hands, bruises, possibly even a permanent limp – the latter obviously providing me with many years of pleasure. On the other hand, rape is the first thing that thrusts itself forward to front of mind when one thinks of getting at women. They supposedly consider it worse than being killed. The problem is, I’m not sure that I’m up to it, being totally honest with myself, not sure that it’s up my street, my bag of tricks, my thing. Paying someone else to do it might be just as satisfying, so long as I could watch. Some Corleone lifted out of the phone book, or maybe listed in the Yellow Pages under GBH. There again, it might be more fun to be the instigator of the damage. To follow her home from work one evening might prove most satisfactory.
Watch her leave Mulqueeny’s office. See her walk against the stream of traffic and the dancing glare of wintry headlights. And, as I’m sure she does every evening, make note of how she stops at the post office to hand over a pile of A4 envelopes, her little recyclable carry bag chock-a-block with recyclable manuscripts – oh yes, we know all about those! She takes a short cut through an ill-lit Soho alley, past flashing strip joints, warmly beckoning bars and restaurants, newsagents and betting shops, on the way to the underground. The pavements, like the roads, are crowded and sometimes one or other of us has to stop or step out onto the road to let people past. I follow close behind her. It’s quite safe: she’s too caught up in her own little life, in her own miserable nine-to-five existence to bother to turn round. She has that young person’s walk I hate so much, with the arrogant, thrusting, you-keep-out-ofmy-way movement of the body. I hate her cockiness, her look-at-me superior air, and the confident, almost flamboyant way she holds her cigarette. Even that annoys me – smoking in the street. It’s so common, so typical of today’s young girls.
I enjoy her being unaware that I’m so close behind. She’s oblivious to the fact that I’m hunting her, bent on bloody revenge. I anticipate the look of shock on her face when finally I reveal myself.
We join the throng heading down the steps into the tube – it would be Tottenham Court Road, which is close to her office. She walks down the escalators, and I follow her. She goes to the Northern Line platform – obviously. I walk slowly past her, between where she’s standing and the edge of the platform. It’s a kind of test. I keep my head turned away as if I’m studying the posters on the other side of the track. My stomach muscles are cramping with excitement, like I’m some teenager about to come in his pants. When the train arrives, I get into the adjoining compartment and stand near the door. I keep an eye open at each station when we stop.
At her station, I follow her towards the exit, keeping her long black hair (which, I have to admit, I’m attracted to) always in sight over the heads of other passengers. She crosses the road to the bus stop. I stand a few yards away, but she never looks round. She gets onto the first bus that comes along, and sits downstairs. I sit upstairs where I can see the mirror showing the platform. When she gets off at her stop, I’m ready. I’m down the stairs and off the bus just as it starts to move away.
I let her walk a little ahead of me. I feel great, really powerful, and I want to beat my chest and send a war cry through the city jungle. I can do anything I want, and she can do nothing – she’s powerless. There’s no traffic around, and no people. Her heels sound loud on the pavement, an irritating, metronomic clicking. I speed up so I can catch up with her. My rubber soles don’t make a sound. It’s exciting to move in for the kill when she’s so unsuspecting, so blissfully unaware.
It’s dark – of course, absolutely. The street lights are lit, but the lights are far apart, so it’s suitably threatening. I’m walking right behind her now, right on her heels. I could reach out and touch her if I wanted to, but I’ll wait until the time is right. Although my shoes make no sound, she senses me there quickly enough – women hate it when men walk right behind them, I’ve often noticed that. She slows down hoping I’ll pass. But I don’t pass. I slow down, too. She half looks over her shoulder, but not directly at me, not into my face. Then she veers across the road, wanting to get away from me.
Her heels are clicking louder and faster. I cross the road too. I can hear her breath. Now she starts to panic, like an animal sensing the hunter closing in and feeling helpless. My heart’s going faster, too, but only because I’m elated. I stretch out my hand and touch the top of her hair, all silky and black. She whimpers, but doesn’t turn round. I think she’s too scared to turn round. She’s walking fast, almost running. To slow her down, I grab a fistful of hair and stop. She’s almost yanked off her feet. I whisper her name – ‘Ms Diane.’
We’re near a street light, but that doesn’t bother me. She can’t ignore me now, not any longer. With a kind of strangulated moan, she manages to half turn round. She gasps when she sees my face. Yes, oh yes, when she realises who I am, when she recognises me, how can she not gasp? ‘Oh hello,’ doing her best to make everything sound perfectly normal despite the fact I’ve got a handful of her hair in my fist. She knows the situation is far from normal. I say nothing, just stare at her. I think she’s mesmerised, like a rabbit transfixed by a fox. I let go of her hair.
‘Can I help you?’ She forces a little smile, but it’s a pretty feeble effort. ‘I didn’t know you lived round here, Mr … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten …’ She’s still into ellipses. It’s a bad habit, especially for someone working in a literary agency. She needs to be taught a lesson.
I still say nothing. She’s clutching her handbag to her chest as if it will offer her some form of protection. Her eyes are wide, and there are tears there, just beginning to appear in the corners. She can’t move she’s so frightened. I think it’s because I say nothing, that’s what freaks her out. I like that. I smile, although it’s probably more of a smirk. I’m really quite pleased with myself, with things running so smoothly. I don’t think it reassures her, my smile or smirk or whatever it is. It probably makes her think I know something she doesn’t, and that it’s not very nice. She’s right. She can obviously be quite perceptive at times.
My next move might be to step forward, right up to her. She’ll then back away. Yes, I can see it: up against a low garden wall with a hedge above it. There would be no lights on in the house behind the wall. I’ll move against her, just touching. She’ll be half turned away from me now, cowering, head down, bowed, panting, almost sobbing. I’ll say nothing. Silence is good, that’s definitely the way to go.
‘I’m sorry, but it wasn’t my decision.’
I’ll still say nothing.
‘I’m sorry, truly I am. If there’s …’
I’ll still say nothing.
‘You have to believe me … It wasn’t anything to do with me.’
Someone turns into the street. He’s at least a hundred yards away. I see him out of the corner of my eye. It’s someone walking a dog. Where on earth did he come from? Who thought of introducing him suddenly? But it’s too late to object now because she’s seen him too. She gives a small cry of hope, the little gasp escaping from her mouth like an upraised hand. But he’s still too far away to be of any assistance to her. I place a hand on one of her breasts. It’s very firm and young. I squeeze it hard nevertheless, yanking her back to face me.
‘Please don’t. Not that.’
With my other hand I squeeze her throat, raising her onto tiptoe, almost lifting her off the ground. She’s making strange gulping sounds, looking down her nose at me, screwing up her eyes as if she’s afraid I’m about to hit her. My face is only inches from hers. She’s not so confident now.
This is what I’ll say, and how I’ll say it. ‘You.’ Her mouth is a scarlet bridge. ‘Should.’
Black mascara, like the dots and dashes of Morse code, runs down her white cheeks. ‘Be careful.’ I can feel her breath against my face; sweet breath, still innocent and fresh, despite the tobacco. ‘Who.’ I let go of her throat and she lets out a small cry. ‘You laugh at.’
It comes out word perfect.
Then I’ll turn and walk off. She’s lucky someone came along (why did I imagine that?). I don’t know how it might have ended up otherwise. I don’t turn back. I make sure I look indifferent, casual as I walk away, as if I don’t care one way or the other. Only when I reach the corner do I glance back down the road. She’s collapsed on the pavement, huddled up, like a pile of discarded clothes on a bedroom floor, not looking back at me at all. The man with the dog is running towards her, the dog yelping excitedly, pleased that its evening walk hasn’t turned out to be as boring as usual.
Of course, as soon as I run that little scenario through my head, I worry that I hadn’t gone far enough with Ms Diane. I tried to think of other possibilities. My revenge should really have something to do with words. Mulqueeny had rejected my words and she’d laughed in my face. Kafka immediately sprang to mind – but of course! His short story about an apparatus that writes on the victim’s body whichever commandment it is that he’s broken, that would be perfect. But how could I go about finding such a machine? It would be difficult. Maybe I could get someone to build one for me – that bloke in Willesden Green who built my bookcase? I’d be able to set it up in the yard at the back of my Kilburn flat, next to the clothes line and rubbish bins. But the thought of having Mrs Dawes out there all the time, complaining about the state of her hubby’s legs, asking me what I was doing and could I keep the noise down and where was Bridgette and who was this new one, this Diane, made me think it might be better if I came up with another idea.
